Facial identification systems are well known. Such systems have included using images from drawings or photographs of portions of faces, such as forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chins. These images are used to build facial composites by selecting and changing the image portions until a desired facial composite is developed according to a description of a witness or victim of a suspect in a crime, for example.
Some patents illustrating facial identification systems involving manually selecting images of portions of faces to produce composite facial images are disclosed in Pat. Nos. 2,974,426 and 4,045,883.
Computerized facial identification systems which allow an operator to develop facial composites of an unknown suspect are also known. In these systems a data base of images is provided which include forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin sections. Some patents which disclose such computerized systems include British Pat. Nos. 1,388,942, 1,546,072 and 1,605,135. Such images may be derived from actual photographs.
The present invention is directed primarily to the preparation of a data base which stores digitized portions of a total digitized image in a storage medium, such as a hard disk. The partial digitized images are derived from full facial photographs of real persons taken by a camera and not by scanning photographs of partial images such as a forehead, nose or the like to provide data for digitizing.
Previous systems including the one discussed in the British Pat. No. 1,605,135 appear to involve creating an information storage system containing a plurality of digital records which are derived by a scan of elementary areas of each of a plurality of photographs of a face or parts thereof. Selected records are adjusted or modified in a computer and combined with other records to provide a visual display.
The system disclosed in British Pat. No. 1,605,135, for example, has a number of disadvantages in the creation of the data base. For example, it is difficult to create the photographs used to provide the data base material without initially including other undesired data, such as, background and other characteristics of the photographs which require elimination or modification before the desired data can be stored. Data attained by directly scanning a photograph is not readily modified and generally requires additional complex steps and equipment to achieve the data base with only the portions of the image.